A German Jew, at the age of 14 she escaped the holocaust in which many of her family died and found refuge in Britain.
After the war, working as a Quaker and a pacifist, she won over the authorities in what was East Germany and for 30 years ran projects there teaching conflict resolution and working with young people.
Now 79 she is a member of the chaplaincy team at Leeds University. Her home is in Menston, between Leeds and Ilkley.
As a child growing up in Berlin she has largely happy memories, particularly of summer holidays walking and climbing in the Alps.
But in 1938, when she was 13, her father died leaving Eva, her mother and grandmother. There were also aunts, uncles and cousins.
In November came Kristallnacht – the night of broken glass, when synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses were attacked by Nazi thugs.
Foolish
"For me that was very, very frightening," she said. "You heard all the glass being smashed up."
The Nazis then came for her father.
"Perhaps the only good thing was that when they came for my father my mother was able to say 'he is dead,'" she said.
Jewish families would leave home early in the morning and spend the day riding on the overhead street cars to avoid being in when the Nazis called.
One of her uncles fled, heading for South America via Britain.
"He'd been foolish enough to fall in love with a girl who was not Jewish. It was forbidden," she said. Opposition to mixed-race relationships is one of the philosophies today's extreme-right wingers have with the Nazis.
Jewish families were forced to give up their valuables – jewellery, even silver cutlery, if they had any.
"I think we were allowed to keep three knives, forks and spoons. It could have been two," she said. "After 1938 I wanted out."
In the Spring of 1939 she got out, six months before the Nazis launched the Second World War. Her mother put her on a "Kindertransport," one of the trains packed with Jewish children whose parents were desperate that the young ones, at least, might survive the unfolding horror – the concentration camps, gas chambers, and ovens which were to claim six million Jewish lives and the lives of millions of gypsies, homosexuals, lesbians, Communists, pacifists, anyone whose race, beliefs, sexuality or lifestyles did not fit the Nazi philosophy of white, Aryan supremacy.
"To me the sacrifice, to let a child go, is quite amazing," said Eva.
Eva's mother stayed behind to care for the grandmother.
Eva came to Britain.
"There was a whole trainful of children. There must have been some adults, but I think they went back," she said.
Eva went to a boarding school, one of five refugee children sitting alongside those of parents in the colonial service.
Letters came from her mother via the Red Cross. They were limited to 25 words. She learned of her grandmother's death in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.
"In February, 1943, I got a letter from my mother saying 'you will never see me again.' So whether she went to a concentration camp and was gassed, whether she committed suicide, I do not know," she said.
Eva left school in 1941 to become a nurse.
From school she took the beginnings of a faith, Quakerism, having been influenced by her headteacher. Eva would clean the headmistress's room for her keep and picked up a book there about the Quakers.
The seeds of faith had been planted in Germany, where the suffering had persuaded her that everyone must have a faith, a belief, to survive.
"I had read the Bible cover to cover, and the Koran," she said.
When the war ended the Quakers asked her to go to Germany to carry out relief work. Most of her uncles, aunts, cousins and other relatives were all dead, but she had no room in her heart for hatred.
"If you nurse hatred it destroys your own life," she said. "My only way to cope with what had happened was to go back and do something useful. We were helping, we were building."
Her home was still in Britain, where she went to college and University studying theology. She taught in Liverpool, Manchester and Hull before moving to Leeds. She set up the urban education department at Beckett's Park college. In 1959 she bought a cottage in Menston village, outside Leeds, and still lives there.
During that time Eva also worked in East Germany for the Quakers.
She said: "Every summer I went back to work there, training them in non-violent conflict resolution.
"I had interesting contacts with the Communist Government. I found out that when I wanted to do something, the first year the answer was no, the second year it was 'we'll think about it,' and the third year it was OK to do it. So you planned three years ahead.
"I won over officials with flowers. I took them to our meetings. They were human beings. It worked. You could not say it was bribery – like bringing coffee, or chocolate, from outside. They were East German flowers."
She took 16 young British Quakers to meet East German teenagers in schools, youth groups, churches.
She spoke at meetings and church gatherings in East Germany.
"You could always tell who were the secret police because they wore leather jackets," she said. "The worst they could do was throw me out, but that never happened."
By 1991 the East German state had collapsed and the Berlin Wall was demolished, though she continued visiting the former East Germany every year.
She had taken early retirement in 1981, but become a voluntary Quaker chaplain at Leeds University.
Eva is also chairwoman of the West Yorkshire Ecumenical Council of Churches, which unites all the county's Christian churches.
Earlier this month, with the church leaders, she signed a "statement of unity" of opposition to racism and the British National Party.
Last year the BNP won almost 25,000 votes in Council elections in West Yorkshire, and the county is the main target of another electoral challenge by the BNP next month, selecting Muslim asylum seekers for its message of hatred and division.
"When anything goes wrong people look for a scapegoat," said Eva.
"As a Christian and a Quaker I believe that there is something of God in everybody. Anything that leads towards dislike and hatred of anyone who is different has to be to the detriment of the country as a whole.
"The Bible teaches us to love our neighbours as ourselves. If we think we are a Christian country we should abide by that teaching."
peter.lazenby@ypn.co.uk